MIT will simplify web development with new Ur/Web language

New computer programming languages are developed all the time. Ur/Web is a new approach to coding for the web set out in a white paper being presented by MIT researcher Adam Chlipala. Built on the foundations of the existing Haskell and ML code family, Ur/Web extends the Ur language to include a library of rules useful in a web development context. It has the potential to significantly streamline web development, taking the stack of technologies which make up a website and putting them all inside a single application that compiles all the required XML, JavaScript, SQL and CSS.

The key aspects of Ur/Web that make it different to traditional web development are its approach to security, and the way it enables coordination and management of relationships between all the components that make up a webpage.

Ur/Web has at its heart a development principle known as “strong typing,” which means that whenever a piece of code or “function” is written, the author also defines what type of data the function accepts as an input and what it will return as a result.

Ur/Web is Ur plus a special standard library and associated rules for parsing and optimization. Ur/Web supports construction of dynamic web applications backed by SQL databases. The signature of the standard library is such that well-typed Ur/Web programs “don’t go wrong” in a very broad sense. Not only do they not crash during particular page generations, but they also may not:

Suffer from any kinds of code-injection attacks

Return invalid HTML

Contain dead intra-application links

Have mismatches between HTML forms and the fields expected by their handlers

Include client-side code that makes incorrect assumptions about the “AJAX”-style services that the remote web server provides

Attempt invalid SQL queries

Use improper marshaling or unmarshaling in communication with SQL databases or between browsers and web servers

This type safety is just the foundation of the Ur/Web methodology. It is also possible to use metaprogramming to build significant application pieces by analysis of type structure. For instance, the demo includes an ML-style functor for building an admin interface for an arbitrary SQL table. The type system guarantees that the admin interface sub-application that comes out will always be free of the above-listed bugs, no matter which well-typed table description is given as input.

The Ur/Web compiler also produces very efficient object code that does not use garbage collection. These compiled programs will often be even more efficient than what most programmers would bother to write in C. For example, the standalone web server generated for the demo uses less RAM than the bash shell. The compiler also generates JavaScript versions of client-side code, with no need to write those parts of applications in a different language.